First in her family to attend college, Julia Reichart was raised in a blue-collar Republican household in a small New Jersey town, her mother a nurse and her father a grocery store meat cutter. At orientation at Antioch College in Yellow Springs, Ohio, in 1964, she listened as others introduced themselves by their parents' occupations: “engineer,” “professor” – and, flushed with shame, she lied about her own. She wrote a first-year essay defending conservative Barry Goldwater but was impressed by the thoughtfulness of her roommate Amy's parents, who she learned had once been Communists. Feeling out of place at college, Reichart dropped out, only to return two years later. An interest in photography led her to attend the march on the Pentagon in 1967, but as she took pictures of antiwar protesters putting flowers in soldiers' guns and saw a friend's head bloodied, she suddenly felt more a participant than an observer. Back in Yellow Springs, she joined the packed meetings of the Radical Studies Institute (RSI), where Marxist readings were discussed, excitedly making connections between empire, race, and capitalism. “We working class people can be agents in history,” she realized. “We don't need to be embarrassed about the fact that we don't know Sartre or what a metaphor is.” The question was, “How do we overthrow capitalism?”

At the RSI men did almost all the talking, with women struggling to be heard, so after a friend returned from a women's “consciousness-raising” session in Gainesville, Florida, in 1968, Reichert helped her start an Antioch women's center and began a campus radio show called “Sisters, Brothers, Lovers: Listen.” For her senior project Reichert decided to make a film on women with her boyfriend Jim Klein, whose interest in audio complemented hers in visuals. Growing Up Female (1970) was the first film to reflect the values of the new women's movement, examining the lives of six ordinary women and girls, ages four to thirty-five. After a year abroad in Europe, Reichert and Klein returned to the United States in 1971 to find the left hardening and dispersing. Many of her radical friends had joined Marxist-Leninist groups, while her feminist friends were forming lesbian communes. Reichert sought a distributor for Growing Up Female, but Newsreel, a New Left collective, declined to distribute it, instead issuing The Woman's Film (1971), which concluded with a call for revolution.